Search Results for: 3d printing

World Economic Forum announces top 10 emerging technologies for 2014

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3D printing, self-healing materials and energy-efficient water purification were tagged by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies as breakthroughs last year, but what does the future look like in 2014? Something that won’t come as a surprise is the key role of advanced materials in driving technology to the next level, as illustrated by our highlights from the 2014 list –

  • Body-adapted Wearable Electronics

    • Small, lightweight and flexible components together with specialized coatings to protect products from sweat and rain. Applications include navigation aids, health monitoring devices and surgical tools.

  • Nanostructured Carbon Composites

    • Lighter, stronger materials for more efficient vehicles, which are easy to recover and reuse.

  • Grid-scale Electricity Storage

    • More affordable alternatives to pumped storage hydropower for overcoming the intermittent nature of clean energy. Concepts being explored include flow-batteries and graphene supercapacitors.

  • Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries

    • Ramping up battery energy density will extend the range of electric vehicles and increase the running time of mobile devices. Results suggest that designs based on silicon nanowires could deliver 30-40% more electricity than today’s lithium-ion batteries.

  • Brain-computer Interfaces

    • The challenges here build on those of body-adapted wearable electronics to include biocompatible materials and thin film technologies to protect implanted electronics.

Barriers to technology translation
As well as announcing its top 10 emerging technologies for 2014, the council has also voiced its thoughts on major hurdles in the translation pipeline –

“Uninformed public opinion, outdated government and intergovernmental regulations, and inadequate existing funding models for research and development are the greatest challenges in effectively moving new technologies from the research lab to people’s lives.”
Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies.

Related stories on the web –

What’s the future for wearable technology? (forumblog.org)

Emerging technology as an agent for change (forumblog.org)

MRS Fall 2013 highlights – part five (final)

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Graphene goes 3D

Switching from the talks to the exhibit, I just wanted to highlight something that I spotted over at the Graphene Labs booth. The firm has announced a spin-off dubbed Graphene 3D Labs, which provides spools of graphene-loaded polymer for use in commercial 3D printers.

In fact, it’s hard to escape 3D printing at the moment. A new Makerbot store opened this week on the walk from my hotel to the convention centre here in Boston.

Further reading on TMR+

MRS Fall 2013 highlights – part four
MRS Fall 2013 highlights – part three
MRS Fall 2013 highlights – part two
MRS Fall 2013 highlights – part one

Additive manufacturing: building the bigger picture

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Low-cost 3D printers have done a great job of putting additive manufacturing (AM) – the process of making objects layer upon layer – on the map, but they only scratch the surface of what this approach has to offer. To see the full range of opportunities, it’s worth taking a deeper look.

The European collaboration of rapid manufacturing has done just that and its 2013 Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) report (PDF) is a worthwhile read for anyone wanting to know more about a field that also goes by the name of direct digital manufacture or e-manufacturing.

Frits Feenstra, who co-ordinates the platform, is well versed in AM, which encompasses a range of processes such as powder bed fusion, directed energy deposition and material jetting.

“3D printing brings something different to the party,” he told delegates at COMS 2013. To support the comment, Feenstra points out that AM gives you the opportunity to embed sensors or to integrate multiple materials and create graded structures with a distribution of physical properties.

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